Displacement Read Online Free Page B

the mask I wore.
    —My ideas about Justice and how it needs to be poetic. In
The Inferno
, the punishments of the damned fit their crimes. Gluttons wallow like pigs, tyrants boil in rivers of blood. Dante struck me when I read him. His vision of Justice is very profound. Beautiful.
    My words further changed the space of our drama the way aromatic woods burned as offerings change a place of worship. The words, unlikely by virtue of their dramatic force, made themselves more likely by my speaking them.
    —I’ve never read Dante, he said. But I’ve meant to. Could you explain more?
    How would my twin nurture his own work when he viewed the tape of this exchange? I wonder if he, through his craft, could feel or express the river-ice fragility of the reality I knew . . . the reality I crafted that allowed me to speak as I did without sounding mad.
    —I killed through myth. I killed
as
myth. I used myth to become as invisible and deadly as the bogeymen that stalk our culture. Dean,
me
, the dying schmuck without health insurance, couldn’t do what I’ve done. I set aside Dean and became myth. Part of the mythology of one who kills is an obsession with myth. Paintings by Blake. Poems. Hogarth illustrations. Dante. Milton. The Old Testament. Look at late night cable TV for my mythic forebears. My templates. Just graze on through the channels. To kill mythically, you have to tap the mythology of the killer. And you have to tap all the myths that such a mythic killer taps. It seems all airy and ethereal, I know. But the clothes and shiny jewellery I wear now are an iconic part of that mythology, too, and they’re real enough to chafe me. Ideas like the ones I just talked about are part of the myth too, and they’re real enough for you to hear them.
    Could I know, as I spoke from my twilight of the real and the unreal, whether I changed the day-lit realm in which Doctor Johansson heard me? Could I know if I were to view the tape of what I’d just said?
    —Why the myth of Dante? Or . . . the myth . . . the myth of the killer who uses Dante? Is that . . . more correct?
    His
words were now like stones, cast tentatively into the wind and shadow I breathed. Like stones, they tested depth. If he hadn’t read
The Comedy
, he couldn’t understand Dante’s
hard and shadowed words
, the graven letters over the Gate to Hell that had made metaphor tangible the moment Dante and Virgil passed through the Gate into the unreality of the Afterlife. If he’d not read
The Comedy
, I couldn’t in good conscience further damage the day-lit world he occupied. Even while my own faint echo of those
hard and shadowed words
inflected the play we enacted, he wouldn’t understand. I couldn’t be an adequate guide to this Underworld. I’m no Virgil. He seemed the sort who’d done drama club in college. I threw him the tether of another myth.
    —You’ve read
Hamlet
? I asked.
    —Yes. I’ve read
Hamlet
.
    —One of your favourites?
    As if a little embarrassed by my insight, he half-smiled as he said, —Yes.
    —I borrowed from the myth of
Hamlet
, too.
    A certain relief touched his face. Wind and shadow became more dense, now that Doctor Johansson chose to follow my voice into their realm.
    —There’s nothing in the reports about poisoned wine.
    —No.
    I smiled at his small goading, so unlike anything his mythic counterpart, the Profiler-Clinician, would be expected to do. I liked that he could surprise me. The atmosphere in the room steadied. It clicked, the way a log shifts and settles in a fireplace. I felt less alone under my hail-burdened sky.
    —Though poisoned wine’s a lovely idea, in the right context. I killed Evan with poison poured in his ear. I took a page from Claudius, because Evan tried to kill me to get a woman he coveted. I killed Evan the way Claudius killed the king. Evan was so good at pouring poison in people’s ears, he deserved a squirt of his own piss, on that count.
    Evan, the All-American boy. He looked